


pitiful children

by Hihoneyimdead



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Autistic Jon, Disabled Character, Kid Fic, M/M, Not Beta Read, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pre-Canon, Slow Burn, They were friends au, Time Skips, listen this was a vent fic okay, no editing we die like men
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:27:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22624792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hihoneyimdead/pseuds/Hihoneyimdead
Summary: There’s someone new in the neighborhood.Jon, frankly, cannot have this.What kind of name is ‘Blackwood’, anyway? It’s too long. They’re probably, like, posh.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 12
Kudos: 110





	pitiful children

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, it's me! I remember seeing a beautiful art going around on tumblr on the same day as a real bad mental health day so i combined them into a vent fic that turned into 'hey what if jon and martin were happy as kids and were in love during the events of the podcast but weren't entirely dumb about it also jon has autism because i do'
> 
> also this will never be updated regularly because College but it should be updated again like. before may at least. so sorry about that one.

**September**

There’s someone new in the neighborhood. 

Jon, frankly, cannot have this. 

Grandmother, though, doesn’t seem to get it. 

She shakes her head, rolls her eyes. She’s barely paying attention over her knitting! Rather uncalled for. 

“People come and go all the time, Jonathan,” she says, gentle as ever. He knows she’s just pretending to understand. She usually does. That’s just what grandmothers do, he thinks, especially grandmothers who are too busy trying to figure out what he has going on that she doesn’t actually understand at all (he hears the conversations with Doctor Smythe next door when she thinks he’s in bed, because his room is right next to the kitchen and he doesn’t like to sleep when he has a book, and he _always_ has a book.)

Jon frowns and swings his legs. She’ll eventually get a couch that fits, she’s said, usually smiling. He likes when she smiles. He wishes she would do it more often than when she is ignoring everything else going on in the world. Adults are stupid. 

“But they’re in the blue house,” he repeats. Grandmother shakes her head again.

The blue house was Brian’s before his family moved away a month ago, before school started. Brian was looking forward to year two because they were going to be in the same class this year, and Jon was looking forward to year two because Miss Crystal’s class is next to the library and he heard she was so old she wouldn’t care if anyone sneaked away any time that wasn’t break because she had to take attendance (Todd was in her class years and years and years ago and every time he babysits Jon he talks about her and tells Jon about how he could get away with anything and everything.)

“People were in the blue house before Brian’s family,” she says. “And people will be there after the Blackwoods move out.”

Jon wrinkles his nose. What kind of name is ‘Blackwood’, anyway? It’s too long. They’re probably, like, posh. Brian would call them skivers. Then he and Jon would get their sticks and they’d chase the Blackwoods away so he could move back in with his mum and dad and things could go back to _normal_.

“The Blackwoods are chuffers,” he huffs, cheeks puffed out, and he preemptively flinches as Grandmother clacks her needles again and snaps at him that that’s rude and he shouldn’t say that and where did he even learn that word was he sneaking to watch the telly after bed again?

Jon just stares ahead and waits for her to finish, then he quietly apologizes and shifts to sit on his hands so he doesn’t start biting at his nails like he does every time this happens because he maybe told her he stopped doing that a couple weeks ago after she started making him wear gloves to bed. 

Grandmother sighs and places her work in her lap, leans over from her armchair to carefully ruffle the hair on the top of his head, and he doesn’t tell her how much that hurts because it’s one of the only ways she seems fine with touching him (she loves him, he knows she does, but she’s almost as bad with Touch as he is, maybe even more.)

“No more telly after seven, alright?” she asks, not even waiting for a nod to continue. “And be nice to the Blackwoods. You never know, they might have a little boy your age that you can be friends with. Like Brian!”

She smiles, and even Jon knows it’s fake. 

He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, right. I bet they have, like, five cats.”

“Families can have pets and children.”

“Yeah, but they only care about one of them. Brian said so.”

Grandmother sighs again. “Brian was- don’t believe everything Brian said. Remember the sand?”

Jon nods darkly. Grandmother nods as well, satisfied, and picks back up her needles. He thinks she’s knitting another blanket for Doctor Smythe to pay for their conversations in the kitchen that Jon isn’t supposed to be hearing. 

“Right, then,” she says. “If you’re so worried, just don’t go over there. They won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.”

People aren’t wasps, he doesn’t say, because talking back isn’t polite unless it’s necessary or the other person is a ‘Tory’, whatever _that_ is. And he’s working on polite. Polite is hard. Polite is stupid. Kids aren’t polite. Adults aren’t polite. So why does he have to be? It’s stupid. Adults are stupid. 

But she’s right. He just doesn’t have to go across the street, and it’ll all be fine. The Blackwoods will move out, probably, and then Brian might come back. Or the house will stay empty forever and Jon can keep writing letters and keep waiting for Brian to write back (he never learned Jon’s address, probably, because they lived across from each other.)

* * *

He has a _rocket_ on his jumper. It’s blue with a red nose and wings and it isn’t accurate at all, but it’s a _rocket_ . No one has rockets at this school! It’s all dinosaurs or horses or army men. Rockets are too sci-fi (even though Billy Preston wears the same robot jumper every Wednesday and his sister Vera keeps playing _Doctor Who_ with Jack Robinson and her brother and Theresa Wiggins.)

“It should have more parts,” Jon says, and the new kid fully jumps and drops his bag to the floor. A bunch of unsharpened pencils come spilling out, and the new kid drops to his knees and gets to picking them up. 

Jon, meanwhile, finishes hanging up his coat, then his hat, then his bag, right in that order even though the cubby doesn’t really fit all three and Miss Crystal said to just put his hat into his bag even though it doesn’t fit and it’s not supposed to go there. Same hook as his coat, on top of it, that’s where it goes, no matter what she tells him. 

“What?” the new kid squeaks, standing and clutching his bag to his chest, covering the rocket. Rude. 

Jon blinks, because he was being rather clear. “The rocket. It’s only one part. There’s supposed to be three.”

The new kid stares up at him, eyebrows crinkled. Confused? Why?

“On my jumper?” he asks, slow. 

His voice is higher than Jon’s, but still lower than Brian’s. He’s smaller than Brian is, too, though not by much. Because Brian was only an inch or so smaller than Jon, and the new kid is an inch below that. It’s weird to find people smaller than Brian. The new kid is weird, he’s doing the same eye thing that Jon did before Grandmother taught him that that isn’t polite and that polite people _ack-now-ledge_ the people they’re talking to (Jon’s eyes hurt, just a bit, and so does his chest, but Grandmother says that that’s normal with eye contact, feeling Weird with a capital ‘W’.) Jon thinks he likes him, just a bit. Not a lot, because that level of friendship goes to Brian and the cat from next door with only one eye and three legs. 

“Yeah.” Jon nods. “It’s wrong.”

“I’m...sorry?”

“It’s wrong. But that’s fine. I’m Jon.”

He sticks his hand out stiffly, because that’s how polite people greet each other. It’s what the people on the telly do, anyway, and in his books, and it’s how he met Grandmother (she still hasn’t hugged him, and that’s honestly just fine.) It hurts, a bit, when someone does shake his hand, but it’s worth it. Supposedly. It will be someday, he’s sure. 

But thank _God_ the new kid just looks down at Jon’s hand and doesn’t move to take it. Thank _God_. 

Jon puts his hand back by his side. The new kid just stands there. Jessica Feebley steps around them, sniffing because she’s _always_ got allergies, and hangs her bag up. Miss Crystal, on the other side of the room, tries breaking Jude and Calem O’Farrell up because they’re fighting _again_. 

“I’m going to go over there now,” Jon announces, pointing at the table in the back of the room under the row of windows. He’s got a copy of _Berenice Gibbley’s Guide to Bears and Bruins_ stashed back there underneath the curtain that he’s been working through since school started. 

“‘kay,” says the new kid, quieter than before. 

A minute passes. Long.

“You can come, too, if you want,” Jon adds. He’s still pointing. He should stop. “Over there. No one else sits back there.”

“‘kay,” says the new kid, still quiet. 

Another minute. Jude O’Farrell punches Miss Crystal in the hip and she screams. Jon fights the urge to cover his ears and just shivers instead. 

“I’m going to go now.”

“‘kay.”

Another minute. Jon slowly lowers his arm and looks down at the ground for the first time in, like, forever, and he can feel his chest loosen up. He nods, mostly to himself, and shuffles back to his table. 

Brian was supposed to sit next to him all year. They agreed back in July when they found out they were going to be in the same class, and it’s just so _quiet_ without him. And Jon likes quiet! He does! It’s just so quiet it’s loud even though it’s stupidly loud in the classroom at all times. Grandmother always tells him that he should try making new friends. The thing is, everyone in his class _sucks_. They’re all too loud and sometimes Mike Tailor throws gummies at him from the next table over. 

Miss Crystal, after a long, agonizing moment of screaming and arguing and awkward humming, manages to get everyone to shut up long enough for her to wrangle them somewhat towards the tables. Mike Tailor and Annabelle Richards and Joan Crawley all sit at the table closest, _loud_. 

Jon swallows down a grimace and glances down at his lap. Approximately ten more minutes, then Book Time. Nothing to do except read until lunch, then back to Book Time until Miss Crystal catches him reading under the slide again and tries making him play with the others until she notices that all they do is throw woodchips at him. Then juice. Then Book Time, then home, then chores, then bed. Not enough time to read at home…

He jumps as the chair across from him slides back and someone sits in it, and he only barely looks up to see the new kid sitting there looking very interested in the dog drawn onto the table in green permanent marker. 

He lets out a breath. 

“Sorry,” he whispers. Jon can hardly hear him over Mike Taylor and Joan Crawley talking about last night’s episode of some dumb radio show Jon doesn’t even wish he could bother caring about. “for not talking. Earlier.”

“That’s fine,” Jon says, because it is fine. He doesn’t talk at home, like, ever. “I don’t like talking either. I’m going to read, anyway.”

“‘kay.”

Jon swings his legs. The new kid keeps staring at the dog.

Miss Crystal claps her hands twice, Jon winces, and the new kid physically startles. 

“Alright, everybody!” she chirps, sounding about half a second away from bursting a vein. Jon likes her. “We have a new friend in the classroom. Martin, would you like to introduce yourself?”

Jon still isn’t looking up, but he can _feel_ the eyes on him, and he instinctively shrinks back. No, not on him, though. On the new kid. Poor new kid. Jon’ll have to warn him about, like, everything later over lunch if Billy Preston doesn’t steal his sammich today. 

A moment passes, then another. Miss Crystal clears her throat once, twice, three times. And after a moment, the new kid slips out of his chair. 

Jon glances up just long enough to try and be encouraging, but the new kid is staring firmly at the floor. 

“‘m Martin,” the new kid says, barely louder than before. “Blackwood?”

And, to quote Brian, who would definitely be kicking Jon under the table right now, snickering into his hand: 

Shit.

**Author's Note:**

> i have a tumblr, but i forget how to link it, so i won't. it's hihoneyimdead tho if anyone wants it. all i do is shitpost i guess.


End file.
